Thing is, the fact that this is still newsworthy in the tiny HN community means that it's on the bleeding edge for people in the real world. I was talking about bitcoin to my workmates the other day and none of them had even heard of it (I've been following it since the Wired article in 2011).
While it's clearly too late to be first, second isn't a bad place either. Just that the arbitrary line is the sand is higher. You can still ride the wave created by the early adopters (who took on the initial risk and validated the entire ecosystem).
As an aside - it would be interesting to see the adoption curve for BTC as compared to Paypal (probably the last disruptive financial platform) and whatever else preceded that (Western union, gold, seashells?).
Nonetheless, I share your pain of not having invested more at the beginning, but that's just the nature of any speculative investment / bet.
Congrats Ger - looks like a lot of fun. I'll give it a spin when I can find some more time to procrastinate.
Have you noticed how Apple appears to butcher the resolution of the screenshots you upload there?
I saw the same thing. I created delicious .png shots in sketch and Apple turned them into shitty lossy jpegs that look hideous.
I even happen to have used the same Intro Inline typeface as you so this is a reproducible glitch. It's a shame because it reflects poorly on us as makers, as well as Apple. For a company whose entire model is based on elegance, I'm surprised they do it.
I've never made a cold call but I've had 100% success with email in 2 scenarios:
1. I've just started a digital magazine with curated articles. I emailed 6 contributors (5 of whom had never heard of me) and just asked clearly and politely for permission to reprint their articles. I gave them the option to say yes or no. I used a similar flow for each but they were personal and focused on the reader.
2. I emailed the local Mac dealer to offer some webdev services (email marketing and SEO). Just as a test, really to validate cold email as a customer acquisition tactic. Again, it was all about the recipient. The polar opposite of the generic emails I get from Indian agencies every week.
There's a great I Love Marketing podcast that talks about a play they call "the cats whiskers". It's worth a listen if you plan to do cold emails. It's episode 24.
Actually, I just thought of a third -
My girlfriend is an artist and had gifted a painting to some friends for their wedding. They hung it prominently in their restaurant and had a few enquiries about it from their customers. They collected a few email addresses.
About a year later, my girlfriend decided to do a limited edition print run and sent 9 emails (just as a test really, to see if there'd be any takers).
Basically said "You saw my painting in Ord Ban. I'm doing a ltd edn print run. Send £100 to my paypal email if you'd like one". Next morning there was £700 in paypal which covered printing/shipping and a profit margin. Not 100% cold because the recipients had expressed an interest but there'd been no prior contact at all.
^This. As I understand it, serifs form a horizontal channel that guide the reader through long passages of text (ie. in books, blog posts). For long lists printed vertically, sans works better because there are no serifs to interrupt the eye path. This is why bullets work well - they guide the eye vertically down the page.
There are a lot of well-intentioned opinions here but it'll be interesting to see if there's any correlation with your real-world data and conversions.
I -for one- am really interested in following your growth but I'm not in the market for a support service (yet). I'm not your customer, why would you care what I think about your UX and whether or not you should have a video lander?
